Your left hand can do it too!: investigating intermanual, symmetric gesture transfer on touchscreens

  • Authors:
  • Michelle Annett;Walter F. Bischof

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada;University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2013

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.01

Visualization

Abstract

This work examines intermanual gesture transfer, i.e., learning a gesture with one hand and performing it with the other. Using a traditional retention and transfer paradigm from the motor learning literature, participants learned four gestures on a touchscreen. The study found that touchscreen gestures transfer, and do so symmetrically. Regardless of the hand used during training, gestures were performed with a comparable level of error and speed by the untrained hand, even after 24 hours. In addition, the form of a gesture, i.e., its length or curvature, was found to have no influence on transferability. These results have important implications for the design of stroke-based gestural interfaces: acquisition could occur with either hand and it is possible to interchange the hand used to perform gestures. The work concludes with a discussion of these implications and highlights how they can be applied to gesture learning and current gestural systems.